“Hip-hop has become a worldwide phenomenon, a world of bling and bravado in which women sometimes appear as little more than a jiggling, sexually rapacious wall of thongs. This image is especially distasteful to the growing number of b-girls, for whom breaking is not just a dance form but a way of life.”
Tag: 08.06.06
Loneliness Of The Long Distance Actor
Being in a long-running show is a blessing for the actor’s bank account. But there is a downside. “It has all the elegance of an old vaudeville clunker: The good news for a theater professional’s nearest and dearest is having that person end up in a long-running show. The bad news? The same.”
Music, Period (But Not In America?)
The period music movement has long been absorbed into the classical mainstream. But why has it not found its way into the larger American musical culture? “What comes out of obscure colleges in the middle of the Arizona desert is amazing. But this doesn’t translate into everyday musical life. I don’t know why. Maybe the structures are too rigid, or there isn’t the motivation. So American players by and large still have to come and work in Europe.”
At The Guggenheim – Paid To Talk Up The Art
That visitor at the Guggenheim is no ordinary patron. He’s been hired to be there. “Although all of New York’s major museums have educational programs, only the Guggenheim hires people to mingle full time in the galleries, interacting with museum patrons in all their quirky diversity.”
New York’s Cultural Building Boom
“In what amounts to a cultural building boom, more than 60 arts institutions spread across the five boroughs — from smaller community organizations like MoCada to citadels of culture like the Morgan Library — are all undergoing or have recently completed architectural renovations or new construction. Fifty-two of the projects, representing an aggregate cost of $2.8 billion.” But can the city sustain all this expansion?
Arthur Erickson – Architecture As Exercise
Arthur Erickson is Canada’s top architect. Greatness has eluded him, but why? “Erickson remains strangely disengaged from architecture as anything more than an exercise in aesthetics. In an age as ugly and coarse as ours, one is loathe to complain about an architect whose main preoccupation is beauty, yet even the most diehard connoisseur of buildings must admit they have a broader function, a larger social responsibility. The best buildings — and the most beautiful — transcend themselves in a way that Erickson’s rarely do.”
Bamiyan Afghans See Their First Movie
A filmmaker who made a movie about the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan takes his movie back to the scene of the crime to show local people, many of whom had never before seen a movie, the story of the destruction.
Protecting Kids For Entertainment? How About Some Parenting?
There have been many attempts to shield children from entertainment that might be “dangerous” to them. “Stickers, chips and the alphabet soup of ratings represent just a few ways that freaked-out parents — or, more accurately, politicians pandering to freaked-out parents — have tried to control what their kids encounter in the media. And that desire for control is precisely where parents go wrong, says an emerging group of cultural observers and media and parenting experts. The key, they say, is to parent within the new technological realities, not in spite of them.”
Artist Sues Over Destruction Of His Mural
Artist Kent Twitchell has filed lawsuits over the destruction of his large-scale mural “Ed Ruscha Monument” that was painted over in June. The defendants, “the suit contends ‘willfully and intentionally desecrated, distorted, mutilated and otherwise modified’ the work. Twitchell has said he received no notice — as required by law — that the artwork, on a downtown building owned by the federal government, would be painted over.”
A Responsibility To Be Hard Hitting?
Richard Montoya’s Culture Clash has made a career out of trenchant political commentary. So what is the responsibility of creators of such work? “Do the creators of, say, the hit musical ‘The Drowsy Chaperone’ feel a certain responsibility to their audiences? I would assume yes. But for Culture Clash and other dramatists of color, it remains a loaded and constant question. I must admit I sometimes suffer from responsibility fatigue.”